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Over the past few years a Ph.D. student has occupied the academic command centre and sketched a number of renovations in order to change the university’s ongoing work to broaden the recruitment of students from homes with no study habit. The point of departure of the renovations is to direct attention to the terms and structures that people with backgrounds different than the academic norm are supposed to become a part of. Rather than focusing on how ‘they’ adapt to ‘our’ way of doing things, these investigations tries to get a closer look at what this ‘Us’ imply and how that reproduces excluding structures. The ambition is to shift the focus from ‘the Others’ to ‘the Firsts’ – from exclusion to inclusion and this concept (firstness as opposed to otherness) is put forward as a prism to co-think key elements in critical theories of normative subjectification: the understanding of hegemony from masculinity studies, the idea of normativity from (objectless) ‘queer’ (and crip) studies and the idea of unmarkedness and invisibility which is key in critical whiteness studies.The body of research on which the renovations are based is composed of 22 interviews with senior tenured academics with family backgrounds with at least one parent holding a Ph.D and three months of fieldwork from two different university institutions with a relatively high percentage of employees reporting being brought up in academic homes. The question that is scrutinized is how a subjectification framed by academic firstness is experienced and how it is lived and demonstrated within Swedish universities. In order to investigate this, haunting, joykilling and flirtatious methodologies are brought into action creating a methodology that is ’serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious’ (Sontag 1964) and aims to find new ways to go about ‘academicness’. The study’s main contribution is reflections around the participant’s extensive, yet unmarked efforts to position themselves as neutral and ordinary. At the center of this positioning is a longing for scientific neutrality, demonstrated in a strong belief in the justice of the meritocratic system, that blind peer reviews protect against discrimination, and that the individual subject perceives its academic accomplishments as unaffected by external factors such as gender, age, background, ethnicity etc. These efforts are read as expressions of an ideology of blindness which is based on a logic in which only that which is within someone’s sight ‘exists’ and can be acted upon. Alternative comprehensions, views and experiences are disqualified by their invisibility to the normative position and as a consequence the idea of neutrality can be generalized which makes the academic system of neutrality auto-reproducing and self-perpetuating.

Between 1908 and 1940, 431 young girls between 16 and 21 years of age were enrolled at Vejstrup Re-education Home for Girls. Through close readings of individual case records and other archival material from Vejstrup Re-education Home, this PhD thesis explores the ways in which the so-called “particularly difficult young girls” were perceived as problematic and how they were handled from 1908 to 1940. The thesis uncovers how the problematisation and handling of the girls changed as psychiatric knowledge was integrated into the field. The thesis is informed by Michel Foucault’s perspective on power and knowledge as mutually constitutive and on power as a productive force that transforms human beings into (specific kinds of) subjects. Introducing the concept of motherly caring power, the reform practices at Vejstrup Re-Education Home are analysed as a specific type of disciplinary liberal government directed at the individual’s will and emotions. The central technique used to re-educate the young girls was the relationship between the headmistress and each individual girl. The aim of re-education was ultimately to lead the girls to regulate themselves to become ‘good girls' and ultimately to strive for becoming servants and wives.The perception of child welfare was that every child could be re-educated, however 4.2% of the children and youth released from Danish residential care between 1905-1940 and 11.4% of the young girls released from Vejstrup Re-Education Home in the same period were released because they had been deemed incorrigible. The expulsions on the grounds of incorrigibility, led to a new problematisation and category that also comprised a new subject: The Incorrigible. During the 1920s, doctors became increasingly involved in assessing the nature of the girls at Vejstrup Re-Education Home, as well as in evaluating how they should be handled. The analysis shows that diagnoses, particularly the diagnosis psychopathy, grew intertwined with the existing category of incorrigibility. The reformulation of incorrigibility to psychopathy and other diagnoses was relevant, because the diagnoses entailed new ways of handling, as well as the anticipation of additional resources. In the 1920s the headmistress attempted to gain ressources for a closed ward at the institution, but did not succeed. In 1930 the subsequent headmistress initiated lobbying for the establishment of a psychopathic institution for girls in 1930. Though she did not succeed, doctors and politicians supported the idea, and a commission was formed to prepare a proposal for the establishment of a psychopathic institution. The thesis uncovers how the problematisation of so-called incorrigible girls as psychopaths emerged at Vejstrup Re-Education Home. Thus the thesis shows how child psychiatry was shaped and practiced within child welfare before the opening of the first Danish child psychiatric clinic in 1935 and before the 1958 establishment of a pedagogic committee in child welfare, incorporating e.g. professional knowledge from psychiatry and psychology.

How can we understand the multi-ethnic workplace as a social meeting place? And what happens if we do not 'frame' in advance the social meeting in the widespread anti-racist frame of understanding? These are the questions that are central to this thesis. Starting from a phenomenological methodology, it is the ambition of the thesis to challenge our usual preconceptions and not pre-define how inter-ethnic relations are to be understood, which is why the thesis - expressed in Goffman's terms - asks: ”What is it that’s going on here?” (Goffman 1974), as a way of finding which framework of understanding should be applied. Based on the part of the lifeworld that unfolds in a multi-ethnic workplace, the thesis examines the social interaction in inter-ethnic collegial relationships as it spontaneously arises and develops in the inter-ethnic collegial relationships in everyday working life. The thesis is based on fieldwork (consisting of participant observation and interviews) at the Food Factory ("Madfabrikken"), a multi-ethnic workplace in the hospitality sector in Denmark. With an auto-ethnographic point of departure, the researcher brings herself into play in the relationships under study, and makes herself an object of observation, reflection and study. In addition to the life at the Food Factory, the thesis is also concerned with the research process, and experiments with different methods of grasping and conveying the life lived in the Food Factory in all its complexity and ambiguity. The thesis explores empirical observations of social interactions, where humour, play and pleasure are on the line. As much as the interplay in the collegial relationships at the Food Factory can be pleasurable and fun, it does, however, bring the risk of danger. It is this duality that is illuminated in this thesis. In the first instance, the humour, play and pleasure are continually on line in the collegial interaction and this contributes to a range of humour-based and sexualized forms of social interaction, where "ethnicity" is defused and enjoyed as an aesthetic and sexualised surface. Secondly, it is true in the sense that humour, play and pleasure risk being on the line or jeopardized, if the rules for the interaction are not mastered or respected. What was previously 'framed' as being pleasurable, sexualized play and teasing at work, or what was set in a humorous frame, is suddenly in danger of being replaced or overtaken by a new 'framing' of the situation as sexual harassment or racism. The thesis does not end up with definitive answers as to how social interaction in a multi-ethnic workplace should be understood and how we can understand it as a social meeting place, but contributes with the knowledge that social interaction in inter-ethnic collegial relationships is vulnerable, ambiguous, fragile, undecidable, manipulable and redefinable. With an object-sensitive eye, the thesis contributes to other, more nuanced narratives about the social meeting of the inter-ethnic relationships - namely the narratives about the life lived and its forms.

The empirical focus of this thesis is the Viking age hoards of Bornholm (c. 850 -c. 1150). Special emphasis is laid on 34 excavated hoard sites, which in unprecedented scale enable us to include the archeological context in the interpretation of Viking age hoards. Three research questions are asked: 1) Do hoards reflect the persons that accumulated, handled and deposited them, and is it possible to identify accumulation strategies? 2) Is the significance of the hoards reflected in the archaeological context? 3) How did hoard act as agents in Viking age society? The basic notion applied in this thesis is that hoards are shaped by humans’ choices and actions, and that these are reflected in the composition and deposition of the hoards. Further, it is hypothesized that hoards had agency and influenced the lives of people and the society they lived in.It is theorized that hoards with different significance were deposited in different settings, and that this reflect the reason for deposition. It is stated that former research on Viking hoards often focused on one aspect of the hoards. However, the analytic entry in this thesis is that hoards fulfilled many different purposes, and that all parts of the hoard are equally important to the interpretation. P. Bourdieu’s theory on capital and field forms the theoretical frame for a multi-contextual analysis of the hoards relation to the economic, social, cultural and ritual field. All types of objects in hoards are included in the analysis where dataon production, circulation and deposition are interpreted. A biographical perspective is applied to explore the most important stages in the life of objects and hoards: production and circulation, accumulation and deposition. Movements and changes are analysedin a local and regional perspective, and the agency of hoards within power, religion, economics, trade, immigration, cultural change, as well as social network and mobility is discussed. It is concluded: 1) That by using a biographical research approach, it is possible to separate various accumulation strategies such as network, trade and raid, and deposition strategies such as savings, raw material deposits and offerings. 2) That by applying a multi-contextual method the people behind the hoards is revealed as men and women, warrior, traders, silversmiths, peasants and the elite. 3) That hoards were agents in the Viking age power structure of Bornholm, and that hoards created social mobility, were mediators between humans and gods, and were agents in establishing and maintaining local and regional economic and social networks.

This dissertation looks into everyday life at two day-care centres of community psychiatry in the municipality of Copenhagen. More specifically, it is about the patients' communication and behaviour, and about the stigmatization fromthe outer world they experience. The empirical material is based on three years of participant observation. The two daycare centres and their districts were situated in opposite ends of the socioeconomic scale within the municipality, one of them in the district of the highest socioeconomic status in the municipality, the other one in a district of very low socioeconomic status. The socioeconomic distance caused marked differences in the patients' communication and behaviour patterns, which had to do with the patients' orientation. In the day-care centre placed in the low socioeconomic status district the patients focused mainly on the patient community, whereas the patients at the day-care centre in the district of high socioeconomic status were oriented towards normality. I analyze patients’ communication and behaviourin line with the communication part of Luhmann’s systems theory approach. The patients expressed varying degrees of communication disturbances: some major, when they could not express themselves in a comprehensible way and therefore could not interact with other patients; some minor, which enabled them to interact with other patients even if they expressed for instance singular delusions. I focus on the day-care centres' double status as places of refuge and as stigmamarkers. They were places of refuge where the patients could talk freely about their symptoms and the effects of psychopharmaceuticals. However, the day-care centres were also stigma-markers because the patients were subjected to stigmatisation and moral judgment as a consequence of their mere contact with the psychiatric treatment system. The literature on stigmatisation describes how the discrimination against psychiatric patients influence their chances in more or less all life areas: Income, education, job and employment, psychological well-being, housing status, medical treatment, health and satisfactory relations. On top of the above-mentioned, psychiatric patients are at severe risk of excess mortality, as recently documented in a forensic autopsy study.